telephone records

A federal judge on Friday found that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records is legal and a valuable part of the nation’s arsenal to counter the threat of terrorism and “only works because it collects everything.”

The Supreme Court is refusing to intervene in the controversy surrounding the National Security Agency, rejecting a call from a privacy group to stop NSA from collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers in the United States.

The Obama administration’s top national security lawyers on Monday rejected the idea that the government should stop collecting copies of every American’s telephone records every day, telling an independent oversight board that it would lose valuable time if each time it launched a terror investigation it had to seek the private billing records from individual phone companies.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats on Wednesday challenged Attorney General Eric Holder over the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation of national security leaks and its failure to talk to The Associated Press before issuing subpoenas for the news service’s telephone records.

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.